VMs in a Flash!

Posted on January 20, 2015 by Tegile Systems

What enterprise storage array could be truly enterprise worthy without having a VMware plugin? How about a VMware plugin that can manage multiple arrays, is simple to install, and has the features system administrators dream about? Now that’s Tegile.

Not only is Tegile’s VMware plugin easy, but it works with vCenter – and for those smaller shops, standalone hosts get the same functionality. Well, that’s great but can it quiesce the VMs to get a consistent snapshot that I can replicate to a remote site to satisfy my DR needs? Why yes! Yes it can. With just a few clicks you are off to the provisioning races.

The Tegile plugin is accessed straight from the home page of the vSphere client. Before you ask, “Well, what about that new web-based VMware client I’m being forced to use?” I’ll answer and say, absolutely, it works with both the desktop and web client. One less reason to complain about that darn web client, I guess. Just double-click the array you want to manage and log in.

Greeted with the clean interface, you’ll see on the left the list of all datastores from the Tegile array presented to the environment. On the right are the metrics. For performance there is throughput, IOPs, and latency at a per-datastore level. Then there is also a usage tab to see the capacity used and remaining. If your protocol of choice is NFS, the VMs tab has stats broken down for each VM. It’s not every day that VM-level performance metrics are so easily displayed, but now it can be.

Time for the really good stuff…provisioning new storage. Clicking on the “Add Datastore” link will bring up a nice little prompt with the options for the new datastore. Once options and hosts are selected, the Tegile array will present the new storage and even do a rescan on the host for you. Pretty neat, huh?

Right along with provisioning comes the rest of the features a VMware admin would ever need to sideline as a storage admin, or at least bypass the enormous queue of tickets the storage admin keeps promising to get to. The VMware guru can expand, delete and even create some manual snapshots of existing datastores. Consider that ticket queue officially bypassed!

And if you ever wished, you could see the scheduled snapshots taken by the array. Wish granted. The VMware admin can rollback to any point in time with exactly 4 clicks of the mouse (and yes, one of those clicks is to confirm the rollback. How’s that for a quick recovery? Thin clones are there too—read-only or writeable, if either of those two options suits your fancy. The clones can be based on any point-in-time snapshot.

The Tegile plugin offers VMware and storage admins everything they could ever hope for. VMware folks get control of their environment and storage admins don’t have to give up access for the entire array. Not to mention storage admins get the weight of that VMware monkey off their back. So, if you ever find yourself aimlessly wandering the streets at night wishing for an enterprise array with a fully featured VMware plugin, then welcome to Tegile.